


LooNEY_DAC's Y0 Grab Bag

by LooNEY_DAC



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, One Shot Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-03 19:03:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8726554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LooNEY_DAC/pseuds/LooNEY_DAC





	1. Survival

If she’d had to pick, she’d say the worst things about this new world were the rats.

The rats under consideration weren’t the of late frighteningly scarce normal ones, though those _had_ caused quite a bit of trouble in the beginning. No, the rats she’d have meant were Beast-rats, ones that could seem normal until you were close enough for them to strike, and then dropped that guise in favor of some demonic form straight from the deepest pits.

Their cat had saved her five or six times over from those things, earning increasingly better treatment from all of them, which, being a cat, it graciously accepted as its due. But the cat was getting old; as with all flesh, the day would come when they lost its protection, but none of them wanted to think about that yet.

Sometimes, when she was just waking up, she’d look at her husband’s face, relaxed in sleep so close to her own, and think the whole thing had been some crazy nightmare; that she needed to hurry off to her job in the bustling city among all the other people; that the world was circling on as it had all the earlier days of her life, with Mankind ruling with a sometimes clumsy but always firm hand. Then reality would come crashing back to her, and she’d have to choke back her tears so he wouldn’t wake and be crushed by them.

He was her rock, the one without whom she would truly have despaired, and he could face beast, troll or giant without flinching, but her tears always felled him. There had been many tears, of course, especially early on, and not just from her. You could _say_ you were ready for the collapse of civilization, play at preparing for the loss of everything you’d ever known, and even believe it to your core, but when it actually came about, you couldn’t watch the world shatter around you without being sliced open by one piece or another.

Tuuli Hollola shook off her despondent mood and put on her “I’m a _happy_ crazy lady!” smile before going back to join the others topside. After all, life went on, even after the world ended.


	2. Sorting the Last Bookshelf

Day 95

The lights flickered as he slipped the book into the plastic sheathing, neatly sealing it away from the elements. He had to work more quickly; there was only one shelf yet to go before his work would be complete. He’d been lucky that the power had held out even this long, and the irony of a librarian shuffling his books in the dark was not lost on him.

He had no idea why he’d started this undertaking, but it was nearly complete. Everything else was packed and sealed and stored away against the day the library would reopen; a day that might never come. Certainly, the library had seen fewer and fewer comings and goings, even before the Illness had flared up--was it only three months ago?

Around one in every twenty had failed to fall to the disease since its rampage began, but those were still far too few even to tend to the dying, let alone to try to keep everything running, so, bit by bit, things had stopped. No, it was more apt to say that they had all wound down, like a mechanical clock without a key.

As his fingers robotically went through the motions of securing the next tome in plastic, his mind replayed bits of dialogue from an old television show: “The Obsolete Man”, an episode from the old Rod Serling series “The Twilight Zone”.

_“Since there are no more books, there are no more libraries. Therefore it follows there would be little use for the services of a librarian... You are obsolete, Mr. Wordsworth.”_

He felt obsolete, if obsolescence brought with it weariness, loneliness, pain and hunger. The last book slipped into its sleeve, and he stood up both slowly and painfully. No one was coming. He was the only one left alive in the town, or perhaps the entire area. The despair of it all washed over him anew as the lights flickered again, until, just as they went out at last, another snatch from that show came to him.

_“I’m a human being! And if I speak one thought aloud, that thought lives, even after I’ve been shoveled into my grave!”_

Brave words, he thought as he made his way through the stacks, the emergency lighting all there was to guide him, but were they yet true? Could he, through this last week’s effort, actually have done something that had a life beyond his own? He’d never know, but he could hope, of course.

Briskly, he locked the doors behind him and set out into the snow. Tomorrow would be soon enough to worry about what he’d do now that he’d finished.


	3. The Gift

“Saku?” The soft voice came to him as he stoked the fires ever higher. “Honey, what are you doing?”

“I’m making something for our daughter,” he replied simply. His lack of a complaint, like ‘I’ll probably die of the heat, but oh well’, seemed to startle her more than what he’d actually said.

“Something for the baby?” she asked at last. “What?”

“Something to protect her, wherever she may be, and whatever her age.” He held up a basic but well-formed rifle stock.

_Emil glanced over at Tuuri, who was staring after the shrinking figure of her cousin through the windshield. “That’s a pretty old rifle Lalli carries,” Emil said, trying to take both their minds off of Lalli’s potential peril..._

Their new forge was crude and ungainly, but it would serve its purpose. The hammer rang against the metal in an age-old melody, and he found himself answering in a song of his own, the tune seeming to speed his hands in their work.

“New-born rifle,  
I beseech you,  
Ever straight and true to fire...”

_“It was our grandmother’s rifle, first forged after the Great Illness.” Tuuri looked thoughtful. “From all I’ve heard, the survivors were still picking their way through the dark back then in their efforts to revive the Old Arts, so the rifle shouldn’t be very good, but somehow, Lalli never misses.”_

“Thus and so I must enjoin thee,  
Ward your wielder well and truly,  
Kindly keep my kin a-quickened,  
Tear the tangling toils of Tuoni...”

_Bang! Another troll went down, shot right through the brain-pan. Lalli released the breath he’d been holding..._

“Guide their hands and clear their vision,  
Grant them ere a word of warning...”

_The warning came to Lalli as though a half-familiar voice had whispered in his ear, “Behind you!” Not questioning that oft-felt hunch, Lalli spun, just in time to down another vermin Beast._

“So I charge thee  
As I forge thee:  
Help the House of Hotakainen.”

Saku laid the hammer aside. This work was done, and, with any luck, done well enough to serve its intended purpose.

Once he had carefully placed the now-completed rifle to one side, he reached for another piece of metal. One down, at least five more remaining.


	4. Aksel’s Turn

_The photo--once such a commonplace as to be shot without a thought, but ever rarer now--was captioned_ “Year 0, Day 34”. _Below, in much smaller print, it named the subjects:_ “Aksel Eide & Berit Eide _(on the right)”_

They had put the first fence up against the monsters on Day 13, also establishing a small quarantine facility nearby. Now, exactly three weeks later, there had been an _incident_ at that facility.

Henrik Hansen was, perhaps, the archetype of what Sigrun Larsen meant when she said, “We have enough crazy old people as it is”. He was convinced, for example, that the world was ruled by a mysterious cabal operating from a secret moon base, and the whole Rash thing was their way of harvesting humanity so the Martians would spare them. This was one of his more rational beliefs.

Now, Henrik’s odd beliefs and odder practices (he copied Benjamin Franklin’s habit of early morning air baths regardless of the season, among other things) would ordinarily have been disregarded by the average denizen of Dalsnes, but when he had returned from his latest excursion into the mountains, the town leaders had made him go into quarantine. “No exceptions, Henrik,” they’d told him, and he’d reluctantly obliged.

Henrik--or what _used_ to be Henrik--was out of the quarantine facility now, and making for the mountains again, followed by a goodly portion of the able-bodied of Dalsnes.

Aksel held his rifle with the barrel pointed to the ground, the stock resting atop his shoulder rather than against it. He had already halfheartedly fired a few times at Henrik, and was loathe to try again. His father had warned Aksel when he got his first gun, “Never aim that at something you don’t wish to destroy”, and Aksel was far from wanting Henrik destroyed. _Perhaps,_ an insidious voice whispered in his ear, _if we keep him alive long enough, they’ll find a cure._ It was a lie, and Aksel knew it, but he just couldn’t bring his rifle to bear again.

A hand grabbed Aksel’s trigger arm, gloved as his own were, and when he looked for the owner, his grandmother Berit looked back at him. The moment stretched into eternity, neither noticing that a picture had just been taken, or who had taken it.

“I don’t want to do this,” Aksel’s face told his grandmother, as plainly as if he’d said it aloud. There had never been any malice in old Henrik, and it was hard to believe that that had changed.

“I know, and I understand, but you must,” Berit’s face replied equally plainly. Whatever the thing was that currently had control of Henrik’s body, it was most definitely not Henrik. As long as it lived, everyone the two Eides cared for was in danger.

A moment later, the rifle, firmly and correctly in place, barked again, and Henrik, the first troll in Dalsnes, was dead.


End file.
